“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Nahum 3:6
In the months leading up to its release, the contents of Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated third feature were kept tightly under wraps. Between its single-syllable title and unforthcoming trailers, most of what the media and film-loving internet sleuths could gather about Nope was that it somehow blended movie-making, UFO sightings, and horror. When the summer release date drew closer and the cast and crew embarked on their press tour in support of the picture, Peele revealed more about his writing process and intent. Quickly, one tantalizing word took center focus and was sent buzzing across media publications and online film communities alike: spectacle. “Nope is a Wild, Awe-Inspiring Spectacle” (NPR), “Jordan Peele’s Jaw Dropping Spectacle Nope” (OutLoud! Culture), and “Nope Rightly Challenges Our Love of Spectacle” (WIRED) are just a few illustrations of the type of headlines Peele’s latest work has conjured.
Nope, of course, is not the first film to set its sights on horror spectacle. Famously, there’s Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window — meta works that explore the ethics of spectatorship both by challenging and adhering to cinematic horror grammar. And as long as there have been these films (and others like them), there have been texts — such as Noël Carroll’s The Paradox of Horror, Cynthia Freeland’s Realist Horror, and Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema — to theorize and philosophize them in an attempt to explore the politics of looking and, more generally, our predisposition for imagery that disgusts and terrifies us.
In The Paradox of Horror, Carroll explores horror as a genre that, “cannot be construed as either completely repelling or completely attractive.” In trying to understand why audiences engage with works of horror, Carroll is met with what he calls the paradox of horror — the question of how people can be drawn to that which they find repulsive. According to Carroll, this tension between the simultaneous repulsion and attraction in horror works is relieved when examining the narrative structure of the genre. He argues that horror stories are constructed as a series of discoveries and are largely driven by curiosity. For Carroll, the primary source of our gratification and interest in horror is not in the monster or the source of the abject, but in the narrative pleasures that derive from our desire to discover and know. He describes our engagement with horror as a type of trade-off: we agree to be subjected to the repulsive in return for a stimulating narrative.
While Carroll’s cognitive approach to comprehending viewers’ relationship to horror is useful for understanding how many traditional horror works function on a structural level, it naively underestimates our interest in horrifying images. Freeland’s 1995 essay, Realist Horror, addresses these limitations. Freeland, a leading philosopher of art, contends that Carroll’s narrative-focused method for understanding horror, what she calls the classical approach, will not work for understanding realist horror as the stories of the subgenre tend to be flat and random. Using Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as her main text of reference, Freeland argues that realist horror and other postmodern genres are not reliant on narrative discoveries, but upon spectacle. Realist horror films, she adds, “may actively encourage the audience in its critical awareness of its own interest in spectacle.”
Although it’s certainly more sci-fi horror than realist horror, Nope too engages spectacle with an unequivocal encouragement for critical awareness. The film follows a brother-sister duo on a cathartic quest to capture “the impossible” and is brimming with multi-layered pop culture references to spectacle staples. Most notably, there’s a cameo from Oz Perkins (progeny of actor Anthony Perkins, who starred as Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, a character created by genre author Robert Bloch and based upon the very real crimes of murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein), mentions of disturbing SNL skits, and a leading character whose initials recall Pro-Football Hall of Famer O. J. Simpson and his highly televised criminal trial and Bronco car chase. These iconic allusions allow Peele to continue the tradition set forth by horror filmmakers before him and erect his own critique of spectacle; something he does masterfully through original storytelling and mythmaking.
At the center of Peele’s otherworldly mythology is an epic extraterrestrial creature whose revulsion for inanimate objects is almost as powerful as its hunger for warm flesh. When the animal regurgitates the belongings of its victims, it bestows keys, coins, and other metallic items upon the pastel Agua Dulce terrain. During the first ‘vomiting’ session, we experience the film’s auditory landscape become eerily quiet — with the exception of faint, distant screams. We soon find that we aren’t the only ones intrigued by this drastic shift in ambience. During this scene, Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) directs his gaze upwards in an attempt to investigate the sound and then mysteriously falls off his horse. When his son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), rushes him to the hospital, we discover that a nickel has penetrated his eye and lodged itself in his brain. The film flashes to a close-up of his lifeless face and, for a mere few seconds, we view the thickness of the coin’s incision. In a twisted body horror kind of way, his eye becomes a coin mechanism; the type you’d find on an arcade or vending machine. It is at this moment where we come to know the cost of looking in Nope — literally.
The metaphoric connections between media, spectatorship, and money continue when examining the x-ray images of Sr.’s skull. In the black-and-white head scans, he is stripped to his bare bones. The warmth of his face and identifiable facial features are erased, leaving only a cold, impersonal skeleton. He stops being recognizable as Otis Haywood Sr. and instead becomes a John Doe substitution for mankind. This very matter-of-fact, medical image of a five-cent coin penetrating the human eye is both cringe-inducing and striking, opening the door for endless analysis (which has become the expectation of a “Jordan Peele Film” and is undoubtedly part of the director’s charm and allure.) An obvious reading of this image is that looking, particularly at horror spectacle, is harmful to the health of individuals and humanity.
This sentiment has long been explored in cinema high and low; films like Blue Velvet, Disturbia, Bird Box, and Nightcrawler serve as testaments to the overwhelming popularity of on-screen deep dives into the ramifications of voyeurism and spectacle. Whether one has an appetite for star-studded blockbusters or prefers the flavors of disturbing Lynchian thrillers, the subject matter has proven to have mass appeal with audiences of all likings. The year 2021 alone saw the release of two Rear Window copycats with The Voyeurs and The Woman in the Window. In fact, Rear Window-fashioned pictures have become so commonplace in Hollywood that some are beginning to find humor and amusement in their continued remakings. Netflix’s 2022 miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window parodies this classic Hitchcock plot and, in doing so, underlines that films about looking continue to intrigue — and perplex — us to such an extreme degree that it can now be seen as comical.
Only, the world is a lot different than it was when Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly sat around and neighbor-watched through binoculars. Our technological landscape has evolved drastically since then. What makes spectacle especially detrimental in 2022 is its accessibility and abundance; qualities that exist largely because of social media and the vastness of the internet. We no longer have to run to the multiplexes to see people be brutalized or violently murdered; we can do that from the comfort of our private bedrooms. Spectacle, unlike ever before, is ever present and just a few finger swipes away. The convenient nature of spectacle has created modern consequences for society, leaving us scrambling to understand and diagnose our online experiences.
A recently defined phenomenon, doomscrolling, describes the compulsive urge to continue to scroll through bad news even when doing so has negative effects on one’s mental health. Doomscrolling is rubbernecking’s more intense, digital younger brother and can lead to the development of Mean World Syndrome. Mean World Syndrome, coined in the 1970s by pioneer media researcher George Gerbner, describes a cognitive bias that can form after prolonged exposure to violence-related media. A person with Mean World Syndrome perceives the world to be more dangerous than it actually is, and may experience heightened anxiety and fear in their day-to-day life. In her essay on realist horror, Freeland states that this negative perception of the world, which spectacle-heavy horror subgenres contribute to, furthers a conservative agenda by, “pushing for increased police patrolling, stricter jail sentences, [and] more use of the death penalty.” Freeland’s observation highlights what’s really at stake when we engage so casually with horror spectacle; a message Nope explores symbolically through the death of Otis Haywood Sr. and its other storylines (specifically that of Steven Yeun’s Jupe Park.)
Beyond offering this critique, the film further complicates our decades-long discussion on spectacle by underlying the changing ways in which our present society engages with the issue. We, as human beings, have always had an acute desire to look, and as previously discussed, this desire has been the subject of numerous cinematic and academic criticisms in decades past. However, in these works, spectacle — no matter how real its individual and societal consequences may be — has always been once removed. Something outside of ourselves. An ‘other’ to be consumed. Nope marks a cultural shift in how we participate in and discuss spectacle, because, while it certainly critiques our obsession with looking, the film simultaneously expresses a profound need to create, document, and even become spectacle; blurring the lines between ‘it’ and ‘us’ and acknowledging our part in its creation. This sentiment is present both on a filmmaking and narrative level.
On the Nope press circuit, Brandon Perea has discussed receiving viewing homework from Jordan Peele in preparation for his role as Angel. The list of films sent to Perea includes Jaws, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien, making it clear that Peele crafted his third feature as a cinematic spectacle in the tradition of Spielberg, Kubrick, and Ridley Scott. Peele himself addressed this desire in an interview with Fandango.
“I’m going to make something that people have to see. And then while I was making it, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with that… Yes, I want people to come out, see my movie. I want to give them an escape, but I can’t ignore the fact that there’s something intrinsically insidious about that.”
What’s so fascinating about the film is the way in which these seemingly conflicting urges — the urge to critique spectacle while also wanting to create it — aren’t actually in conflict at all.
This harmonization of contradictory values is also present on a narrative level and is most clear when examining the background and journey of characters OJ and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer). From the very beginning, the film makes it known that the Haywoods possess a prestigious cinematic legacy. This legacy is central to their business and family identity. The pair are the great-great-great-grandchildren of Alistair Haywood, a key player in motion picture history who Emerald dubs the first star, stuntman, and animal wrangler wrapped into one. In other words, the exhibitionism of their ancestor paved the way for cinema as we know it today (at least this is true in the Nope universe). Oftentimes, the need to entertain can be a generational curse for descendants of stars, and this desire to contribute to the business of looking is certainly not lost on the Haywood siblings. That is why, when the pair have their first extraterrestrial encounter, they head to an electronics store the very next day to purchase security cameras in hopes of capturing the UFO creature, who they nickname Jean Jacket, on video. As their story progresses, the siblings recruit and join forces with Angel, the Brandon Perea character, and raspy-voiced cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to make this dream a reality.
The quartet devise an elaborate plan involving dozens of inflatable men, their previously installed security cameras, and a hand cranked film recorder for good measure. But once the scheme is in motion, the group is unexpectedly visited by Ryder “TMZ” Muybridge (Devon Graye), a tech-savvy trespasser whose name is a reference to Eadweard Muybridge (a real-life pioneer of motion-picture). Muybridge, who is ruthless in his chase for UFO footage, arrives fully prepared with a handheld steadicam in one hand and his motorcycle clutch cable in the other. The rider is a grim caricature of the viral YouTuber-type; a media creator who isn’t afraid to transgress social and physical boundaries in their pursuit of click-worthy content. This is particularly evident in his costume design; his reflective chrome helmet grants him complete anonymity while simultaneously creating distorted images of everyone and everything he encounters. His head is somehow totally empty and all encompassing at the same time — a lot like the worst corners of the internet. When Ryder is thrown off his bike and presumably injured, his concern does not lie in his health or physical state, but rather in finding out whether or not OJ recorded the moment. In fact, his last words before being inhaled by Jean Jacket are, “I need my camera!”
The Haywood siblings’ quest for the “Oprah Shot” and their subsequent encounters on that journey showcase that technology has democratized the spectacle playing field. The creation of spectacle is no longer reserved exclusively for Big Media and budgeted film sets, but is within reach of you, me, and anyone with a phone in their pocket or a camera on their doorbell. Through video-focused applications like TikTok and Youtube, we’re partaking in spectacle in a manner that is more intimate than ever before: we’re creating spectacle and, in many cases, becoming it. Except, there’s an important distinction in the types of spectacles being produced. There’s consensual spectacle: YouTube personalities and TikTok stars who document themselves in eye-catching ways (doing sexy dance routines, elaborate skits, physical comedy, and so on). This consensual production of spectacle is typically rewarded with internet fame, brand deals, and channel monetization.
But then there are cases like Jean Jacket, people or things that do not ask or give their permission to be turned into a spectacle, but whose to-be-looked-at-ness (either due to their perceived otherness or visual-shockingness) is so compelling that they are turned into spectacle anyways through the prevalence of surveillance culture or the actions of a Muybridge-type onlooker: non-consensual spectacle. Cases of the latter tend to capture, immortalize, and reinforce racist, sexist, and conservative norms. Examples of non-consensual spectacle include a Twitch livestream of a racially motivated mass shooting in a supermarket, bodycam footage of police committing brutalities against an unarmed Black man, and photos of a teen girl’s dismembered body being uploaded to Instagram by a rejected suitor. This looming threat — the notion that our potential humiliation, abuse, or even deaths could be captured on camera and broadcasted for the world to consume without our consent — is the very first idea presented in Nope as the film opens with a Bible verse that reads, “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”
This quote, as menacing and threatening as it may be, is not in reference to the UFO, but the film’s human agents. For they — OJ, Emerald, Angel, Antler, Jupe, Ryder — are the ones who, through their desire to exploit Jean Jacket, make and become horror spectacle. Their actions show that we can no longer place the blame of spectacle solely on arcane entities like ‘the media’ or Hollywood and instead must acknowledge our part in its creation and the responsibilities that come with that. These conversations are difficult to have, but if the enormous box office success of Nope is any indication of our cultural state, we’re more open and willing to understand than ever.
